DREAMERS
351
(and even understand) but cannot control. Born
in
reaction,
it
is a
counter-dream to the Marxian vision of apocalypse and social change
which moved the thirties; and of the hysterical despair which under–
lay it, the paranoia which its myth of the class struggle at once
nurtured and concealed. But for the antipolitical politics of the for–
ties-fifties, too, there is an appropriate psychosis, as there is for all
brands of politics: the conviction of impotence freezing into cata–
tonia-the total paralysis of the will of those with no place to go
except
up
into the Counselor's seat at the right hand of the leaders
of utterly corrupt states. Both the thirties and the forties-fifties, how–
ever, merely
suffered
varying forms of madness bred by Freud's
Oedipal dream and the failure of Marxian politics.
It
was left to the sixties (which got off to an even earlier start
than most decades somewhere around 1955) to
celebrate
psychosis;
and to attempt, for the first time, not to pretend schizophrenia was
politics, but to make a politics of schizophrenia recognized for what
it is: a total and irrevocable protest against Things-as-They-are in a
world called real. And behind this movement, too, there is a Jewish
dreamer, yet one more Joseph sufficient unto his day. I mean, of
course, Allen Ginsberg who has escaped the hangup of finding or not
finding the ear of Pharaoh, by becoming a mock-Pharaoh, a
Pharaoh of Misrule, as it were. Think of his actual presence at the
head of parades, or his image looking down at us from subway
hoardings- crowned with the striped hat of Uncle Sam.
Ginsberg, however, unlike the Josephs before him, is no father's
darling at all, not even such a baffled aspirant for paternal favor as
was Kafka. He is a terminal son, to be sure, like the other&-but a
mama's boy this time, unable to imagine himself assuming papa's role
ever ("Beep, emit a burst of babe and begone/ perhaps that's the
answer, wouldn't know till you had a kid/ I dunno, never had a kid
never will at the rate I'm going" ), or saying
kaddish,
that tradi–
tional Jewish mourner's prayer which becomes an endearing synonym
for "son"; except for his mother- called Naomi, and identified in his
mythological imagination with her Biblical namesake, and with Ruth
and Rebecca as well, though not with Rachel, that favored second wife
of Jacob. She was a lifelong Communist, that mother who haunts
Ginsberg, who died- lobotomized and terror-stricken- in the nut-
